Video for Windows

~ the last words ~

i came in at the wrong end of this one. by the time i had a modem at home in 1998 the phrase video for windows meant nothing to me, but.avi meant a great deal, and it kept on meaning a great deal through the divx years when the internet cafes were full of half-downloaded films. that extension was the last thing standing from a product that had already been dead for a year before i ever saw a browser.

it started as a defensive move. apple had quicktime working on the mac and was pushing it onto windows, which meant the pc had someone else's video layer or none at all. microsoft answered in november 1992 with video for windows 1.0, a retail product for windows 3.1 with a runtime and a set of tools called vidcap and videdit for pulling video off a capture card and cutting it. the specification topped out at 320 by 240 at thirty frames a second, and on the hardware of 1992 you were lucky to get that.

version 1.1 landed in november 1993, dropped 16-bit processors, and added the codec that defined the era. cinepak from supermac made full-motion video playable off a double-speed cd-rom drive without a decoder card, which is the entire reason the multimedia cd-rom industry existed. a version shipped with windows nt 3.5 in september 1994. by windows 95 in august 1995 the whole thing had stopped being a product you bought and become a part of the operating system, which is usually the last promotion a technology gets before it is retired.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the piece that mattered most was not the player. it was the video compression manager, an interface that let anyone drop a codec into windows and have every application on the machine suddenly able to open that format. microsoft video 1 and intel's indeo shipped in the box. cinepak arrived a year later. after that it was open season, and for the next fifteen years every codec that mattered on windows came through that same door.

the other piece was avicap, the capture side. it was how a tv tuner card or a webcam talked to software, and it stayed the standard for that job until windows driver model capture drivers took over around the turn of the century. plenty of hardware sold in 1999 still shipped with a vfw driver in the box because that is what everything expected to find.

~ what it became ~

activemovie 1.0 arrived in july 1996 with mpeg-1 support and the ability to read quicktime files, and it was built on a filter graph rather than the flat api that came before. microsoft renamed it directshow in march 1997 and folded it into directx media. from that point video for windows got no new work. the code stayed in the operating system because too much software called into it, but nobody was developing it any more, and microsoft's own documentation now flags the compression manager as legacy with a recommendation not to use it in new code.

directshow itself is now in the same position, superseded by media foundation, which means the pc video stack has been buried three times over and none of the graves stayed shut. avi files still open. the header format from 1992 is still parsed correctly by software written thirty years later, mostly because nobody has ever been able to afford to stop parsing it.

~ the long tail ~

this is where it reaches me. divx and later xvid installed themselves on windows as vfw codecs, using the exact plug-in mechanism microsoft built in 1992 for cinepak. virtualdub, the tool everyone used to cut and re-encode downloaded films, was a vfw application with a menu called compression that listed whatever you had installed. the codec packs that circulated on turkish forums in 2003 were, underneath the installer, a pile of vfw drivers being registered.

so the honest version is that i never used video for windows and i used it constantly. the product died in 1997. the socket it left in the operating system kept the divx era alive for another decade, and the extension is still on files people are downloading now, long after the platform and the cd-rom industry it was built to serve both stopped existing.

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